Peter Lovesey: The Secret Hangman

To Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond

Dear Mr Diamond,

This is so difficult. Several tries have ended in the bin already.

Please be kind and read to the end before making up your mind.

I’m a woman of — let’s say a few years younger than you. Like you, I was married for a time but now I’m back to the single life and I can’t say I enjoy it even though I’m left with my own house and enough to live on. What else? I went through university in the days when it was difficult to get in. I like a lot of the things you enjoy, like old black-and-white films, rock music and the occasional glass of beer. I’m lucky enough to be in good health. People tell me I’m good company. Figure-wise, I could still get into some of the clothes I had as a student if I’d kept them, but I keep up with fashion, so I’m always buying new things. You don’t have to be a detective to see where this is leading, so I’m going to stop wittering on about myself.

I just wanted you to know I’m not the Wicked Witch of the West.

You’ll be wondering how I know so much about you and I’d better come clean and say I read about you in the paper a couple of years ago and cut the piece out because I liked your picture and the things you were saying. It was a feature article with a photo. I just loved the way you talked about your life in the police. You give it to them straight whether they’re chief constables or cub reporters from the Daily Grind. Since then I’ve followed you through several cases and it’s obvious you’re in the top bracket as a detective.

What do I want now I’ve plucked up the courage to write? I just wonder if you’d like to meet some time for a drink and a chat? My generation of women isn’t used to making the first move, not face to face, and even writing it down like this is a big effort — which is why I’m hiding behind a made-up name and no address.

I’ll be in the Saracen’s Head this Thursday between seven and eight. If you come in, I’ll introduce myself.

In anticipation — and thanks, anyway, for reading this far, Your secret admirer

Lady, if you knew anything about me you wouldn’t bother, Peter Diamond thought. He sighed and shook his head.

He dropped the letter into the bin with the other junk mail. The envelope was about to follow, but didn’t. He’d noticed it was the self-seal kind and the seal wasn’t too good because the flap had come apart easily without tearing anything. He tried sealing the thing again and it wouldn’t hold — just as if someone had opened it already.

No stamp. No address. Just his name on the envelope and By hand written where the stamp should have been. She must have delivered it to the front desk, and that gave him an uncomfortable thought. Suppose the entire nick knew he’d got a secret admirer.

Now he picked the letter out of the bin, replaced it in the envelope and put it in his jacket pocket. Later, he’d put it through the office shredder.

A worse thought: some joker on his own team had done this as a hoax. They were waiting to see his reaction.

Well, he wouldn’t give them that satisfaction. Bugger it, he’d check their reactions. He got up and took his usual route between the desks towards the door at the far end, appearing nonchalant while alert to any suggestion of a snigger. At one point he stopped and swung round as if he’d forgotten a file and needed to go back.

No one was paying him any attention.

Two, at least, had their eyes on Ingeborg, the novice detective, as she bent over a filing cabinet. Keith Halliwell, the longest-serving DI — and well capable of practical joking — was on the phone. The civilian staff were fingering their keyboards.

Yet he doubted if Halliwell would stoop to this. Halliwell had been with him that ill-fated morning when he attended a crime scene in Royal Victoria Park and made the worst of all discoveries. Keith of all people knew better than to trespass on his personal life.

The hoax theory withered and died.

He moved on and kept going through the building as far as the canteen. Picked up a mug of tea and a sticky bun and parked himself at a table at the quiet end. He was used to being alone.

Not for long. Assistant Chief Constable Georgina Dallymore, the closest thing he had to a boss, appeared from nowhere carrying a glass of water and sat opposite him.

‘Peter, you look peaky.’

Peaky. That was a word from the past. He’d last heard it used by one of his aunts forty years ago to explain why she wouldn’t sample his mother’s Victoria sponge.

‘I’m OK,’ he said to Georgina.

‘Overwork?’

‘Hardly.’

‘Something personal?’

‘I said I’m OK.’

The boss gave him a sympathetic look. She’d given him looks like that ever since Steph was murdered, as if she expected him at any moment to bury his face in her bosom and sob uncontrollably. She said, ‘An MP report has come in.’

‘That’s all we need,’ he said, rolling his eyes upwards.

She frowned. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Politicians, that’s what’s wrong. We don’t want them breathing down our necks.’

‘Not members of parliament,’ she said in the despairing tone of a schoolmistress to the kid who never listened. Diamond had an inbuilt resistance to abbreviations. ‘Missing person.’

He thought about that for a while before saying, ‘Got you.’

‘A woman in Walcot with a partner and two small daughters was out on Tuesday night and hasn’t been home since.’

‘Tuesday? That’s only yesterday.’

‘It’s very unlike her,’ Georgina went on as if she hadn’t heard. ‘She’s in the habit of speaking to her mother on the phone every day at the same time.’

‘The mother reported it. Not the partner?’

‘He’s relaxed about it. Says she must have needed space and she’ll come back when she’s ready.’

‘He’s probably right. And you want it checked?’

‘Please, Peter.’

‘Isn’t it rather quick? One night away isn’t much. She’s not a fourteen-year-old.’

Georgina’s chest expanded, an ominous sign well known in Manvers Street nick. ‘I happen to have spoken to her mother. She’s in my choir. A level-headed woman. She wouldn’t fuss without reason.’

He understood now. Georgina was a devoted singer. How good her voice was, he didn’t know. She had joined, and left, several of Bath’s many choirs over the past four years. Even so, there is a fellowship among singers, a kind of freemasonry as Diamond viewed it, that meant they helped each other when they could. She was going to insist on a routine check.

‘Who’s looking after the kids?’ he asked.

‘The partner.’

‘Are they his?’

‘I believe not.’

‘His name?’

‘Corcoran. Ashley Corcoran. More importantly, hers is Delia Williamson.’ She handed him a scrap of paper with some details she’d got from her friend in the choir.

Missing persons are a constant of police work. Over four thousand join the list every week in Britain. Rebellious teenagers, runaway spouses, middle-aged dropouts, feeble-minded old people. The index grows steadily, but a good proportion return. Some give cause for real concern. A few are never heard of again.

He returned upstairs and told DC Ingeborg Smith to find out what she could about Delia Williamson.

‘Are you thinking this is a domestic, guv?’ Ingeborg asked, mustard-keen as usual. She had everything on computer at the speed of a texting teenager. As a former investigative journalist, she was used to meeting deadlines.

‘I’m keeping an open mind. When you visit the partner — this Corcoran — make sure a man is with you.’